Running header: MY WHITE CULTURE

Accepting the Realities of My White Culture

Corey Kapolka
Michigan State University
TE 822-301 Summer 2014

MY WHITE CULTURE

I was raised in a comfortably middle-class family. Our family home was located in a
high-quality suburban school district, where I had (mostly) very good teachers in (mostly) wellbehaved classes. I never really wanted for anything materially important in life, though we
werent particularly wealthy. In my schools, some students were noticeably from well-off
families, while others were poor. But almost all of us were the same in one important respect: we
were white.
The boundaries of our district extended only to the limits of the suburbs not into nearby
Grand Rapids city and its urban neighborhoods. Our schools were not intentionally segregated,
but the fact that those neighborhoods which fed into these schools were predominantly inhabited
by white families meant that the student population in the schools could hardly have been
considered racially diverse. For a short period after I began studying in high school, we had rare
few students of color in a school of 1500 students several of whom were adopted into white
families. Soon after, some groups of students from outside of this ethnic monoculture entered the
district at various times, but those that I remember remained isolated within the social structure
of our school.
Shortly after the Bosnian War, our area received a large community of ethnic Bosnian
families fleeing the carnage. Though they could have been considered white, the children of
these families generally stayed within their own ethnic social groups. Differences in language
and upbringing created a perceptible divide between the pre-existing social groups of my school
and those of our newly accepted refugees. Several years later, a similar pattern emerged when
students from neighborhoods within the city of Grand Rapids were bussed to our high school to
enroll. The dominant majority of white middle-class suburban students did not merge well with
this new group. It was not a malicious or even intentional divide; it felt more like a disinterested

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neglect. Our racial groups remained comfortably separate, reinforcing through inaction a kind of
modern school segregation.
I was among the students of the dominant white culture who neglected to try to
incorporate these new classmates. At the time, it didnt seem important to intentionally approach
transfer students and include them in social activities or try to become friends. Eventually, I
thought, things would work out and our school would naturally become integrated. That never
really materialized. I, like most of my classmates, remained focused on our own studies and
close social circles. I didnt think anything wrong of that then, which still bothers me today.
Being from a comfortable middle-class family in a good suburban school, I was expected
to succeed in academics. To us, high school was simply preparation for college, and our teachers
were largely of a similar mind. We had siblings and friends with siblings who all went to college,
got decent jobs, and settled into family lives. We saw students portrayed on TV that looked like
us, talked like us, and had aspirations that became ours. We could relate to the struggles of lonely
teenagers and road-tripping friends in movies. We knew what we could be, and we knew that we
could succeed. For many of us, not receiving As and Bs in our classes was horrible, because it
meant that we werent moving along the smooth life path that our parents, teachers, and
television shows said that we would. We had to be good students, because to us, that was the
whole point of being in school.
Since I did not often socialize with races other than my own in high school, the
development of my beliefs, behaviors, mannerisms in a word, my culture was limited to
white culture. We weren't taught much about other cultures beyond a few units in history and
social studies classes. We were taught culture by our parents, by our peers, and by our teachers
all of whom (aside from a select few peers) were white. Looking back, it is rather striking that

MY WHITE CULTURE

none of the teachers at our high school were of any other ethnic or racial group than the
dominant race of the school. Like the neglectful divide between the dominant and introduced
racial groups of our school, I do not believe that our teachers intended to prevent us from
learning the perspectives of other racial groups. But their entire teaching ideologies were built
from within white culture, and so we were not encouraged to critically analyze the role of our
own culture in the struggles of subordinate ones (Sleeter, 2005). The lack of a variety of
experiences and perspectives on racial issues gave us a stunted understanding of racial diversity
and the importance thereof. It wouldn't be until college that I would learn to appreciate
something of the modern struggle of subordinate racial and ethnic groups.
I appreciated in grade school that I did not have a good understanding of racial groups
beyond my own, though I did not realize just how important my racial identity was to my entire
worldview. I did not appreciate just how powerful my racial privilege was because the privileged
culture was really all that I knew. Nearly a decade removed from my secondary schooling, it is
plain to see many privileges that we had that I failed to consider at the time. For instance,
because white Americans tend to be more well-educated and employed than other racial groups,
they can afford to locate their families in districts that are known for quality schools. My own
parents did just that when they were planning to start their family. Within these quality schools
with predominantly white students, study of the culture of the dominant racial group
(white/caucasian) is given a great deal of importance relative to other racial cultures. This is still
largely true even in predominantly non-white schools because the textbooks, teaching materials,
and standards available for those schools are often the very same as for suburban white schools.
Where ever a white student may go, they will find that their racial identity is given a great deal of
weight in their studies (McIntosh, 1989).

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Similar to what Olson (1992) observed, as white students in a predominantly white

school we did not need to worry about relating to the racial identities of our teachers and
administrators. Our faculty and staff were staggeringly white, and were members of the
community around our schools. In schools populated by mostly students of color, the proportions
of racial identities of teachers and administrators are often very similar to those of suburban
schools mostly white. But in the context of schools whose students are a mix of black, latino/a,
asian, and white, most of these students have difficulty finding teachers who look like
themselves. They see people in positions of power and knowledge and can get discouraged at the
wild disparity between the demographics of their communities and the makeup of the teachers
who are supposed to help them bridge the racial divide.
Considering the problems that exist in schools with a large disparity between the racial
makeup of the students and that of faculty, I worry that I am perpetuating these problems by
entering teaching as a white educator in urban schools. How can I help bring a greater racial
diversity to the teaching faculty in schools dominated by students of color when I am a white
man? No matter how hard I may push my students to join the profession and become examples
of great teachers for their own future students, my own skin will betray that I am still a part of
the dominant racial group that exerts immense control over secondary education.
But regardless of my worries about my own skin, I will be a teacher in racially diverse
schools. If I cannot expect my students to empathize with me based on my race, I may be able to
instead approach them by accepting some of their own culture, such as subtle language styles, as
my own (Christensen, 2008; Delpit, 1994). In me, they may not see a black man or a Latina
woman, but they may see that many of the ways that they talk and behave that are not typically
'white' are also not unacceptable ways to act. I cannot expect my students to conform to the

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standards expected of me at my own high school, because those standards were couched in the
expectations of one particular culture that is not their own. If I can show my students that I do
not look down on their culture, but rather that I am trying to embrace it as far as a teacher can, I
believe that I can begin to bridge the cultural divide between us.
In my schooling, 'gifted' students were identified using standards based on mathematical
and logical skills-based testing. Being raised to excel in these areas, many of us in those schools
qualified for inclusion into the gifted group. But for students who have not been raised and
taught to exceed expectations in the academic areas considered important for the 'gifted'
distinction, their talents can be neglected due to a nearsighted focus on one particular set of skills
rather than considering a wide set of abilities as being special. In racially diverse schools where
teachers have not pushed and prepared their students to think independently and develop a
critical eye for questions, these schools can appear to be full of students who lack the sorts of
special qualities that children in white schools possess. This is not necessarily true - there may be
an abundance of gifted students who are simply not recognized by teachers who are not looking
for them, and many students may simply be gifted with skills that are not included in the
conventional definition of gifted that emanates from suburban schools (Ford, 2010).
As Philipe Ernewein of the Denver Academy advocates, teachers should consider how is
this student smart? rather than how smart is this student? Every student is capable of some
sort of achievement in the classroom; it is the responsibility of their teachers to encourage the
growth of physical and mental skills that are appropriate for each individual student. I want to
teach with this goal in mind. My students may not meet the standards for being 'gifted' that
existed when I was a young student, but they may be capable of artistic, linguistic, or analytical
feats that are not normally associated with giftedness. I want to encourage each of my students to

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grow as scientists using their own individual abilities, and not to worry about conforming to
standards of excellence that just aren't relevant for them. In fact, science can often be an artistic
pursuit mathematics and logical reasoning are important, of course, but finding out why the
universe is the way it is takes a great deal of creative thinking.
Teaching in a poor urban setting is not easy, and neither is providing individual
motivation to hundreds of students. But students in high-need urban schools deserve a good
education just as much as students in suburban white-dominated districts, and I know that most
of them appreciate their dedicated teachers. I have worked with many students at Everett and
Eastern High School who made it clear that they did not enjoy school, but their reactions to
individualized teaching showed that they certainly enjoyed learning. If I find that the students in
my classroom resent education but love learning, I will need to teach in such a way that the
educational system that has failed them so far is merely a backdrop for their own learning
processes.

MY WHITE CULTURE

References

Christensen, L. (2008). Putting out the linguistic welcome mat: Honoring students home
language builds an inclusive classroom. Rethinking schools, 23(1), 19-23.

Delpit, L. (1994). Language diversity and learning. In Other peoples children: Cultural
conflict in the classroom (pp. 48-69). New York: The New Press.

Ford, D. Y. (2010). Recruiting and retaining gifted students from diverse ethnic, cultural, and
language groups. In J. Banks and C. A. Banks (Eds.), Multicultural education, 7th
edition (pp. 371-391). New York: John Wiley & Sons.

McIntosh, P. (1989, July/August). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack. Peace
and Freedom, 10-12.

Olson, R. A. (1992). White privilege in schools. Staff, Family, and Community, 83-84.

Sleeter, C. E. (2005). Teachers beliefs about knowledge. In Un-standardizing curriculum:

Multicultural teaching in the standards-based classroom (pp. 28-42). New
York, Teachers College Press.